Boys do cry (especially if they're being screwed by the Iraq War).
One look at that Soldiers-by-Abercrombie & Fitch poster is enough to tell you that Stop-Loss is not your dad’s war movie. Still, two things struck me when I went to see it on an unquiet Sunday night. One, in retrospect, was not a surprise. When Ryan Phillippe’s newly stop-lossed, and thus righteously pissed, Iraq War soldier Brandon King declares to his commanding officer, “With all due respect sir, fuck the president,” a significant percentage of the viewing audience cheered. You don’t necessarily expect a home state-loving screen Texan to heartily dis Midland’s favorite son (unless it’s a Dixie Chick, bless her). An audience in a blue city in a blue state sharing that sentiment? Not exactly shocking. The second thing, however, was truly startling. That is, when I’m going to see a movie about war and soldiers and other such “manly” pursuits, I do not expect to see a preview for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Then again, given that the majority of the audience who went to see Stop-Loss on opening weekend was female, maybe the trailer placement guru knew something I didn’t. Never underestimate the impact of three pretty boys in the poster art, I guess. Nothing like a pouty, cut Phillippe and his two pouty, buff co-stars Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to distract easily malleable teen girls from the fact that Stop-Loss is an Iraq War movie. With R-rated combat carnage. Yuck.
It’s not news that Iraq War/War on Terror movies are officially box office kryptonite. Indeed, when reading the list of titles (In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, The Kingdom, Rendition), there’s always at least one that I’ve forgotten even existed (Grace is Gone tends to be that one). And these are movies that all came out less than a year ago. Maybe the powers that be in Hollywood during the Vietnam War were in fact more wise than cowardly in keeping that particular war overtly off the screen (except in John Wayne’s rah-rah The Green Berets) for the duration of the conflict itself. This is not to say Vietnam wasn’t there during those years. It was just disguised as Korea in M*A*S*H, or (ballsy) World War II in Catch-22, or the frontier in The Wild Bunch and Little Big Man. By the time filmmakers started to directly address Vietnam in the late 1970s, several years after the fall of Saigon, audiences were ready for the visceral stories of the war at home and abroad depicted in Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and the floridly metaphorical yet still specific Apocalypse Now. I guess a war has to be absent from the daily news for a few years for it to work as a fictional narrative. That way, at least we’ll know on one level how it ends.
Stop-Loss is in some ways the “best,” i.e. most apposite, Iraq War film so far in that it is about the endless-ness that has come to define the war (and made it so repellent to the ADHD-afflicted mass movie audience). The war won’t end, the post-combat damage really won’t end, and even when a soldier thinks his individual experience of the war is over, it’s not. It’s about young men who have been steeped in traditional ideas about manhood (honor, duty, football, guns, “managing their women”) permanently losing control of their lives because of myths of power and dominance perpetrated by the likes of Toby Keith, hypocritical senators, and (male) bureaucrats, including the “fuck”ing president, who never have to worry about actually fighting in a war. Ouch. No wonder they’re all crying all the time.
Now, it would be easy to say that because Stop-Loss was directed and co-written by a female, Kimberly Peirce, it is a tear-soaked melodrama. The gritty, violent, tense Iraq combat sequence that opens the film, though, shows that Peirce could have made a straight-up war action movie just as well as any of the big boys if she’d wanted too. It’s more accurate to observe that because, as she showed in Boys Don’t Cry, Peirce is fiercely attuned to the fraught emotional lives of men (and women) who tend to be the victims of the “American Dream” rather than its recipients, Stop-Loss is a tear-soaked melodrama. Guess who tends to line up for tear-soaked melodramas. Yes, those who might opt to see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Or those who thought Channing Tatum was dreamy in Step Up. Tatum’s sniper wannabe Steve, in fact, might be speaking for the audience that isn’t going to see Stop-Loss when he tells Brandon at the end of their tour that he’s going to miss “blowing shit up.” Indeed. Blowing shit up ultimately is not what Stop-Loss is about. Sorry, boys. It’s the Iraq War soldier film as overwrought “woman’s picture.” Almost.
The prominence of leading man Brandon’s non-romantic interest Michelle is instructive here. Abbie Cornish’s Michelle is not just “the girl.” Indeed, the character for whom she is “the girl,” Steve, quickly loses her because he uses her as a punching bag and expects her to unquestioningly stand by her man. This assumption about Michelle’s duty, incidentally, is a sign of how messed up Steve is (okay, maybe this is a movie young, impressionable girls ought to see). Instead, Michelle becomes Brandon’s partner on his AWOL odyssey. His best guy friends can’t believe he’d abandon the team even though they are highly, highly aware of why he might think another tour in Iraq is about as appealing as being flayed alive. Michelle, on the other hand, understands how it feels to be royally screwed by an institution you trusted (i.e. engagement to be married), and why it is neither dishonorable nor cowardly of Brandon not to want to go back to Iraq. She may be able to match tequila shots with Brandon, but she also grasps the emotional and psychological nuances at stake for her friend. He grasps them too, and even goes so far as to say that out loud. He talks about his feelings to Michelle. This is a good thing. Gordon-Levitt’s Tommy does not talk about his feelings. Instead, he drinks too much, gets into trouble, and shoots things. Then he shoots himself. So much for stoicism as a coping strategy.
In fact, the psychologically cleansing quality of a good cry and an honest discussion of feelings comes to the foreground in the troubled Brandon’s climactic confrontation with obsessively dedicated soldier Steve. Brandon returns to Texas (the scene of the crime, as it were) after Tommy shoots himself. Steve finds Brandon contemplating Tommy’s casket in the cemetery. Naturally, Steve’s first impulse is to beat the shit out of Brandon for letting Tommy fall apart. He’s gotten too enmeshed in the military notion that mind-less violence will do the job in Iraq, so really, why shouldn’t it do the job at home. Brandon, however, starts to get through to Steve when he explains that the box in his head where “you put all the bad stuff” is overflowing, and he can’t keep it out of his mind anymore. As if to illustrate, Phillippe’s tear ducts overflow while he speaks. Steve’s violence is finally quieted, and a single tear escapes down his face as well. He may not agree with Brandon, but he understands. Plus, he’s already signed up for the anonymous, clean, les traumatizing killing promised by sniper school and its one-shot, one-kill philosophy. One shot, one kill, one tear…but it’s still the more emotive, thoughtful, and haunted man Brandon who is the Bronze Star leader and “hero” of the story. No wonder MTV Films and Paramount decided to try selling it as a young women’s film, with all the non-action, girly relationship stuff that implies.
Regardless of the connection Brandon starts to repair with his comrade Steve, it’s Michelle and Brandon’s mother who witness his final decision about whether to stay in the Army or go to Mexico. His Vietnam vet father may love him and support him, but he doesn’t take that drive with Brandon to the border. The decision has more to do with the (emotional) strength embodied by the women who have to watch their loved ones destroyed by war than the idea of (physical) strength represented by the military. Brandon’s physical strength has never been an issue. If his violent disarming of the thieves who broke into Michelle’s car isn’t enough to prove that, his ability to physically subdue the bulkier Steve does. No, it’s the emotional and mental toll of choosing between uniformly horrible options that forms the crux of Brandon’s problem. He makes his choice. Amid the expected reaction shots of the various characters in the final scene, the camera holds for a while on Phillippe’s face as Brandon’s fate sinks in. And damned if I wasn’t thinking of the closing shot of Stella Dallas and Barbara Stanwyck’s pain over doing something that causes her enormous anguish, and yet is the only thing she can do. Only this time, Brandon isn’t crying. That, in the end, is still his mother’s job.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
